DID YOU KNOW? Shopping thrift is a great way
to snag fashionable clothing and one-of-a-kind accessories,
collectables, books and household items for a bargain.
Value Village purchases its merchandise from more than
60 nonprofit offices across Canada, which allows each store
to stock nearly 100,000 items on its sales floor each and every
day! So the selection is ever-changing and always fresh!
So how does it work? Every Value Village location partners with a charitable
organization in its community, including Canadian Diabetes Association,
Oasis Clothing Bank, Ontario Federation for Cerebral Palsy and the Kidney
Shopping and donating at Value Village provides a great way for customers to
reduce, reuse and recycle!

Foundation of Canada. All year round, each store pays its nonprofit partner for
every donated item, including clothing, housewares, books and more. Over
the past 10 years, Value Village has purchased more than $1.5 billion of goods

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in order to have a positive impact on the environment, from switching to

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energy-efficient light bulbs and eco-friendly cleaning products to carrying
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nonprofits for a home pickup or drop off their items at convenient Community

getting organized with spring cleaning,” said Tony Shumpert, Vice President

Donation Centres located at every Value Village store.

of Recycling Operations for Value Village. “By donating these items, instead
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visit valuevillage.com.

one of the largest recycling programs in the world, saving more than
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SUPPORT:

DONATE AT:

census not soothing
population-aging fears
despite a burst of growth in the number of
canadian toddlers, new census data makes it
clear that our society as a whole is getting older
toronto

$20,000,000
pages 6, 24-25

Wednesday, May 30, 2012
News
worth
sharing.

metronews.ca | twitter.com/metrotoronto | facebook.com/metrotoronto

Body parts found in packages
Horror in Ottawa.
Box containing a human
foot was addressed to
the Conservative Party
of Canada, police say
Ottawa police say a second
package containing a body part
has been found just hours after
a stunned Conservative party
receptionist opened a bloodsoaked box containing a human foot.
The first was found Tuesday
morning in a package that had
been delivered to the party’s
headquarters a few scant blocks
from Parliament Hill.
As a result of further investigation, Ottawa police said Tuesday night that they intercepted
a second suspicious package
containing another human
body part.
Police released no other details about the second find, and
said the major crime section
continues to investigate.
Tuesday morning’s macabre
discovery led to a pre-noon call
to police and paramedics about

Another gruesome discovery

“We are taking the
information from Ottawa
also to make sure, if
parts are missing here in
Montreal, whose foot is
missing in Ottawa?”
Const. Daniel Fortier
Authorities in both cities are trying to determine
if there might be a link to the foot mailed to
Conservative party headquarters.

a suspicious package.
The first officers to arrive
on the scene spotted blood
splattered on the package and
immediately called in the hazardous-material unit. When the
specialists opened the package,
police found the severed appendage inside.
“Upon arrival, officers noted
that the (box) package possibly
had blood stains on it,” Ottawa
police said in a statement.
“The Hazmat Unit and
Emergency Operations Section
were called and upon further
inspection of the package it was
determined that there was possibly a human foot in the box.”

Police said the package was
addressed to the Conservative
Party of Canada and not to a
specific person.
The horror was not confined
to Ottawa. Ottawa police were
consulting with their counterparts in Montreal after they
discovered a severed torso in a
suitcase. Montreal police sifted
through a heap of garbage
in the city’s west end to see if
they might turn up any missing limbs. Authorities in both
cities are trying to determine if
there might be a link to the foot
mailed to Conservative party
headquarters.
“We are still looking in the
garbage to find if there are
other parts missing. We are
still looking,” said Const. Daniel
Fortier.
“It doesn’t mean it is related.
That’s why we must perform
autopsies in Montreal and Ottawa.”
Ottawa police said it was too
early to speculate on a link.
By late afternoon, a coroner
confirmed the foot found in
Ottawa was indeed human remains.
the canadian press

The sky is not It’s back to Syria
falling, Toronto for diplomats
A police officer removes a package containing a human foot from the Conservative Party headquarters in Ottawa on
The chances of being hit by a ranTuesday. Investigators intercepted a second package containing another human body part, police said in a statement
dom falling object are pretty slim,
T:10”
on Tuesday night. Visit metronews.ca for more information. Sean Kilpatrick/the canadian press
a math professor says page 4

Offer valid on May 31 & June 1 from 4-8 pm and June 2 from 2-6pm exclusively
at the Toronto Eaton Centre La Senza store for a free cotton panty with any $25
purchase (up to $8.50), while supplies last. Offer has no cash value and is valid
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of this offer, you must present this coupon (with UPC code) at the time of
purchase. Photocopies are not accepted. Limit of one coupon per customer.
Customer Service: 1-888-LA SENZA (527-3692)

Hatchet involved
in road rage case
One man is in hospital and
another is in custody after
what police are calling an
instance of road rage involving a vehicle, a school bus,
and a hatchet.
Police were called to the
intersection of Islington Avenue and Dixon Road south
of Hwy. 401 just before 3
p.m. on Tuesday afternoon.
Police said the driver
of the vehicle appears to
have entered the school
bus, at which time the bus
driver allegedly produced
a hatchet and injured the
other man. There were no
kids on the school bus at
the time. TORSTAR NEWS SERVICE
Investigation

Photographer
accused of sexual
assault
A 37-year-old Toronto man
is facing charges after police
say two women alleged they
were sexually assaulted by a
photographer.
It’s alleged that a 19-yearold model went to a photography studio in March 2011
and was sexually assaulted.
Police say that during their
investigation, a second
victim was identified. Ryan
Chamberlain, 37, is charged
with two counts of sexual
assault and sexual exploitation. THE CANADIAN PRESS
Toronto-area woman

Body retrieved
from Everest
The body of a Toronto-area
woman who died while
returning from the summit
of Mount Everest has been
brought off the world’s tallest mountain. A spokesman
from Utmost Adventure
Trekking says Shriya ShahKlorfine’s body has been
taken to her family in the
Nepalese capital Kathmandu. THE CANADIAN PRESS

03

Honoured. Actress Tonya New details released.
Lee Williams named
TTC offers $25K to catch
one of top 25 immigrants Dupont subway shooter
Tonya Lee Williams is known
for her role on the popular
TV drama The Young and the
Restless, but today, it was her
personal story (and not her
fictional storyline) that was
brought to the forefront.
The actress was one of 25
Canadian immigrants who
were honored yesterday in
Toronto for their tireless work
in the community. Moving to
Canada in 1970, her personal
triumph and local contributions over the years helped the

actress stand
out among
her peers.
“I get to
share a story
not as the
girl on The
Actress Tonya
Young and
Lee Williams
the Restless,
PHOEBE HO/METRO
I get to share
the story just
as an immigrant here and how
I had a dream just like anybody
and to make your dream come
true,” she said. PHOEBE HO/METRO

Will the TTC shooter strike
again at the Dupont subway
station?
Police say they fear another
attack because three armed
holdups by the same individual
have been four months apart.
June marks the fourth
month since the last attack, on
Feb. 26. At a news conference
Tuesday, the TTC said that for
the first time in its history it is
posting a reward of $25,000 to
catch this person — who police
said may be a woman.

And all the attacks have a
similar pattern committed by
a well-disguised, heavy-set person wearing either a surgical
mask or a balaclava.
Another key characteristic
released for the first time is that
the shooter is likely left-handed
because in all three holdups the
person carried a gun in the left
hand. All the attacks have been
carried out at the Dupont subway station on the weekend in
the evening hours.
TORSTAR NEWS SERVICE

TTC employee suing
police for G20 incident

Two years later. Says he
still suffers flashbacks
from time in custody
and was diagnosed
with post-traumatic
stress disorder
A TTC employee allegedly
scooped from the street and
thrown behind bars while on
his way to work during the G20
summit is suing Toronto police
for more than $3 million.
Elroy Yau, a 39-year-old who
worked as a TTC fare collector
at the time, is seeking damages
from the police services board
for what he calls a breach of
charter rights that left him
shaken, depressed and unable
to work for months.
“I try not to think about it,”
said Yau, who has since been
transferred from his fare collecting position to a job driving
TTC streetcars due to claustrophobic symptoms he says surfaced after the G20 incident.
According to his statement of
claim filed last October, Yau was

G20 tactics

News of Yau’s lawsuit comes
less than two weeks after
Ontario’s police watchdog
released a scathing systemic
review into police conduct
during the G20 weekend in
June 2010.

1
NEWS
On the web

Dark
Knight
under
the sea

The underwater world
has its very own Batman.
It carries the shape of
the Batman symbol
comic fans know all too
well, and it’s baffling
scientists. Watch this
and other bizarre
aquatic phenomena at
metronews.ca.

Mobile news

The investigative report by
the Office of the Independent Police Review Director
detailed controversial tactics
that saw police round up
and detain more than 1,000
people in cramped detention
centres, only to be later
released without charge.

walking toward Queen’s Park
station at around 7 p.m. on June
26 when a plainclothes officer
knocked him to the ground. Another officer then pinned him
to the ground and shackled his
legs, despite his TTC identification. He was then allegedly sent
to the makeshift G20 detention
facility on Eastern Avenue and
held for 29 hours before he was
released without charge, the
claim said. TORSTAR NEWS SERVICE

Former TTC ticket collector Elroy Yau, 39, is suing Toronto police for over $3 million,
claiming his charter rights were violated during the G20 summit. Yau says
he was walking to work in uniform when he was thrown to the ground by
plainclothes officers. CONTRIBUTED

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news

04

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Torontonians have no
need to fear falling sky?

Transit. Experts doubt
the Eglinton LRT will
be completed on time
A panel of leading North American transit and construction
experts is casting doubt on the
province’s ambitious promise
to complete the Eglinton LRT
by 2020 using a public-private
partnership.
That schedule “seems unrealistic,” according to a committee assembled by the American Public Transit Association
at the request of the TTC.
Its preliminary report will
be part of an update about the
four Toronto LRT projects at
the Toronto Transit Commission meeting on Wednesday.
The TTC’s role in managing
construction of LRTs on Eglinton, Finch, Sheppard and the
Scarborough RT has been simDecisions, decisions

Transfer tax brings
in $336 million
The land transfer tax that
Mayor Rob Ford wants to
kill has become an important source of cash for
Toronto, the budget committee has been told.
The tax, introduced in

The blame game

What are the odds?
It’s pretty unlikely
you will be hit by
something: Professor

Although the TTC has a
consultative role and is expected to operate the lines,
its managers say they have
no real authority over how
the project is built and fear
they will be on the hot seat
for community complaints
they can’t solve.

mering for about two years,
since Metrolinx put Infrastructure Ontario in charge of building the provincially funded
$8.4-billion projects.
torstar news service

2008, is a main reason the
city has been posting large
year-end surpluses, said
chief financial officer Cam
Weldon.
The expected windfall
has left-wingers looking to
restore services while Ford
and his right-wing adherents want to use the fiscal
breathing room to cut taxes.
torstar news service

It’s a bird! It’s part of a plane engine! It’s a coconut?
Truth be told, over the
course of human history some
bizarre things have fallen from
the sky and rained havoc on unsuspecting citizens.
But the chances of actually
being hit by a random object
— such as a coconut from a
palm tree or concrete from the
Gardiner — are pretty unlikely,
said Neal Madras, a professor in
the department of mathematics and statistics at York University.
“I don’t think it’s something
people need to worry about in
daily lives,” Madras said.
Try telling that to the residents of Peel Region, whose
cars were smashed by blackened metal pieces from a failed
engine of a Boeing 777 that had
taken off from Pearson airport
on Monday.
Toronto has seen its fair

Gravity’s fault

Here’s a couple of bizarre
incidents throughout
history involving falling
objects:
• Aeschylus, one of

the first playwrights
of Greek tragedies,
became something of
a tragedy himself when
he was said to have
been killed by a falling
turtle. It was dropped
by an eagle believed to
have mistaken the man’s
bald head for a rock
on which to break the
turtle’s shell.

A man holds debris that caused damage to vehicles Monday afternoon
when an Air Canada Boeing 777 returned to Pearson following engine
problems after takeoff. rick madonik/torstar news service

share of falling debris in recent
days, with damaged window
panes falling to the street from
the upper levels of the RBC
Centre Monday evening and yet
another piece of concrete landing on the sidewalk under the
Gardiner last week.
But Madras said you can
think about it this way: Toronto
occupies 630 square kilometres

• In 2010, a Colombian

man was killed by a falling coconut as he rested
under a palm tree, local
media reported. While
cited as a more common
killer than shark attacks,
there were just over 20
falling coconut incidents
reported in recent years
on the Pacific islands,
none of them fatal.

and is home to 2.6 million
people. That computes to 240
square metres per person —
roughly the size of a doubles
tennis court. But if every single
person was standing out in the
open on any given day, the
chances of anyone getting hit
by a falling object would be one
in 250, Madras said.
torstar news service

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06

news

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Toronto is less grey than the
national average: Census
A snapshot of the city

By the numbers. Ratio
of seniors in city is
12.7% versus 14.8%
across the country
Senior citizens now represent 12.7 per cent of the
population of the metropolitan area of Toronto, a ratio
lower than the national
average, the latest census
numbers from Statistics Canada show.
Newly released census
information on age and sex
makes it clear that Canadian
society is getting older. The
data released Tuesday comes
from census forms filled out
May 10, 2011 ­— a moment
in time when the first of the
baby boom generation was
turning 65.
The census showed that
706,665 people in what’s
known as the census metropolitan area of Toronto were
aged 65 or older. The figure
of 12.7 per cent of the population compares to a national
average of 14.8 and a provincial average of 14.6 per cent.
Five years ago, the 2006
census showed that 11.9 per
cent of the metropolitan

• The number of children in

the metropolitan region
of Toronto — those aged
14 and under — has
increased since the last
census.

• Those of working-age

population in the Toronto
region — people aged
15-64 — represent 69.9
per cent of the area’s residents. That’s up from the
2006 census when 69.5
per cent of the population
was made up of workingage residents.

• The median age of the

Miles Nicholas Mendoza was born at 1:02 a.m. on May 28. The latest census figures show that while the population
is getting old, we’re also in the midst of a baby bump. CARLOS OSORIO/TORONTO STAR

population of Toronto were
seniors.
Statistics Canada uses the
term census metropolitan
area to describe any area
with a population of at least
100,000, where the urban
core of that area has at least

50,000 people. Looking at
metropolitan areas this way
takes into account the growing impact of suburban areas
on Canada’s largest cities.
The national census is
conducted every five years.
The information published

Tuesday is the second of several releases of data to come
from Statistics Canada over
the next year and longer that
will eventually paint a detailed picture of the country,
right down to local level.

metropolitan Toronto area
was 38.6 years, compared
with 37.5 years in 2006.
(Statistics Canada defines
median age as the point
where exactly one half of
the population is older
than the median age and
the other half is younger.)

Avenue and Lake Ontario
has the highest concentration of people who are
19 to 34, with 65 per cent
of the total population in
that age bracket.
• In a northern corner of
Milton, near Highway 401
and Steeles Ave., you’ll
find a higher percentage
of males than anywhere
else in Toronto’s census metropolitan area
— 65.61 per cent of
the population there is
male. This census tract is
home to the Maplehurst
Correctional Complex, a
medium-to maximum-security correctional facility
for adult males 18 and
over.
• Want history lessons
from people who’ve been
there? Head to the area
bordered by Allen Road,
Ranee Avenue and Bathurst Street, where 15 centenarians live. This census
tract includes Baycrest.
Torstar News Service and
The Canadian Press

The Canadian Press

Schools must allow ‘gay’ in club names: McGuinty

Premier Dalton McGuinty.
Adrian Wyld/THE CANADIAN PRESS

The Ontario government refused to back down Tuesday in
a fight with Catholic educators
over the use of the term gaystraight alliance, but rejected
suggestions its aim was to end
the separate school system.
“I think it’s a couple of fundamental values that transcend
any one faith ... respect and
fairness,” Premier Dalton McGuinty told reporters.

“We do everything we can
in the confines of our homes
to love and respect and accept
our children. We just want to
make sure the same kind of
atmosphere prevails in publicly
funded school systems.”
Thomas Cardinal Collins,
Archbishop of Toronto, accused
the Liberal government of infringing on religious freedom
by amending its anti-bullying

bill to say Catholic schools must
allow student clubs to use the
word “gay” in their names.
McGuinty dismissed the
Cardinal’s argument.
“We’re not mandating the
terminology gay-straight alliance,” he said, “but we think
it’s very important students
should so choose to be able to
use that language.”
McGuinty, who is Roman

Catholic and whose wife Terri is
a teacher in the separate school
system, said his job is to look
out for everyone.
“Cardinal Collins has his responsibilities ... but I have a different set of responsibilities,”
he said.
“I’m accountable to people
of faith, and people of no faith.
I’m accountable to all parents,
and I think the fact that I know

we have something in common
as parents — we want to make
sure our kids are accepted and
respected for who they are.”
Collins said he has frequently heard the argument
that Catholic schools should
not accept public money if
they don’t want to have the
government tell them what to
teach.
The Canadian Pres

Bob Dylan among medal recipients
Medal of Freedom.
Quoted
Presented to people who
have made meritorious “I understand that the impact these people have had
beyond me. It will continue for generations to
contributions to national extends
come.” U.S. President Barack Obama
interests of the U.S., to
world peace or to other Medal of Freedom to more than highest civilian honour to 13
a dozen political and cultural recipients, living and dead, the
significant endeavours
Sketching impressive contributions to society in intensely
personal terms, U.S. President
Barack Obama presented the

personal connection to a number of this year’s recipients,
calling them his heroes.
“I know how they impacted
my life,” the president said. He
recalled reading Morrison’s
Song of Solomon in his youth
and “not just trying to figure
out how to write, but also how
to be and how to think.”
InMay
college7,
days,
Obama said,
president908483A06_FCB
took note of the over2012
flow crowd in the East Room he listened to Dylan and re2012
calledAdvice
“my world
opening up,
and said TDCT_P1700
it was “a testament toBrand
how coolP1700_F_1_ST
this group is. Every- because he captured something
body wanted to check ’em out.” about this country that was so
Obama then spoke of his vital.” the associated press

U.S. President Barack Obama presents rock legend Bob Dylan with a Medal
of Freedom on Tuesday at the White House. charles dharapak/the associated press

LGBT. Petition backing
gay mom to be presented
at Boy Scouts meeting

From saving for a vacation

Supporters of a lesbian mother
will present a petition at the
Boy Scouts of America’s annual
meeting in Orlando to protest
her removal from a troop in
Ohio.
Deborah Tyrrell’s supporters will present the petition
with more than 275,000 names
when the Boy Scouts meeting
begins in Florida on Wednesday.
Tyrrell was removed last
April as a leader of a troop in
Ohio. Boy Scouts policy proBan revoked

To home ownership
We’ve got advice either way.
With our network of branches and longer hours, we’ll help you get the advice you need,
comfortably and conveniently.

hibits gays from being adult
leaders.
Among those who will
present the petition is Eagle
Scout Zach Wahls, an Iowa college student who was raised
by lesbian mothers. A video of
Wahls urging Iowa legislators
not to end civil unions went
viral last year.
A Scouts spokesman said
there are no plans to change the
policy.
the associated press

Caught on video

Racy 50 Shades
returning to
Florida libraries

Racist rant lands
British woman
in prison

A Florida county is putting
the racy romance trilogy
Fifty Shades of Grey back
on its library shelves.
The Brevard County
Library System had pulled
19 copies of the bestsellers
from its bookshelves earlier
this month. County officials
said the decision was made
after they read reviews of
the trilogy. A county spokesman also called the books
“semi-pornographic.”
On Monday, the county
announced that the books
would be available immediately through the library in
response to requests from
residents.
Library-services director
Cathy Schweinsberg said
the library was against
censorship.

A British judge has jailed a
woman whose racist tirade
toward fellow subway riders
went viral on YouTube.
Jacqueline Woodhouse,
42, boarded the subway
drunk on the evening of
Jan. 23 and began berating
passengers with a profanityfilled, racist verbal assault.
A seven-minute video of
it was uploaded to YouTube
and viewed more than
200,000 times.
Judge Michael Snow
sentenced Woodhouse to 21
weeks in jail on Tuesday in
London, saying that anyone
hearing her “grossly offensive” language would feel a
“deep sense of shame.”
Woodhouse turned
herself in to police after the
footage began to circulate.

the associated press

the associated press

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10

news

Presidential race. Obama
campaign plays Trump
card over ‘birther’ issue
Donald Trump, the celebrity
business tycoon once dismissed as a “carnival barker”
by Barack Obama, went on a
full-fledged tear in the media
on Tuesday, doubling down on
his insistence that America’s
first black president was born
in Kenya.
On the day he was to appear alongside Mitt Romney
at a Las Vegas fundraiser for
the Republican presumptive
nominee, Trump belligerently
defended himself against accusations he had lost his grip
and was hurting the man who
hopes to replace Obama in the
Oval Office in November.
“I walk down the street
and people are screaming:
‘Please don’t give that up,’”
Trump told CNBC in response
to a new Obama ad that
maligns Romney for failing to
distance himself from the real
estate mogul’s resurrected

conspiracy theories about the
president’s birthplace.
When Trump flirted with
his own run for the Republican nomination last year, he
put the so-called birther issue
in the national spotlight.
the canadian press

Tennessee. Ruling halts
construction of mosque
over lack of public notice
Construction of a Tennessee
mosque that has been strongly
opposed by critics of Islam likely will be stopped after a judge
ruled Tuesday that local officials didn’t give the public adequate notice before the meeting where it was approved.
The mosque was one of several Muslim projects in the U.S.
that hit a swell of conservative
opposition a year or two ago
during the controversy over
a plan to build a Muslim community centre near the site of
the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

on the World Trade Center in
New York City.
Chancellor Robert Corlew
found that the Rutherford
County Planning Commission
didn’t do enough to inform the
public of the May 2010 meeting
when it approved the site plan
for the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro.
Though his ruling voids
the approval, he noted there
was nothing stopping the
commission from reconsidering the issue.
the associated press

Investigators in Qatar carried
out their first extensive probes
through a fire-ravaged daycare
centre and other charred areas
inside the country’s biggest
mall Tuesday after a blaze killed
19 people, 13 of them children.
The blaze and equipment
failures that hampered firefighting raised questions about
safety measures in the megastructures across the wealthy
Gulf.
The findings from the stateordered inquest are expected
within a week, the official
Qatar News Agency said. Commentators quickly called for
extensive safety reviews after
the sprinkler system malfunctioned during Monday’s fire.
The tragedy also is likely
to push authorities across the
Gulf to further examine firesafety rules in a region where
the drive to build fast and big
has brought concerns about the
quality of emergency planning.
Rescue crews in Qatar’s capital Doha had to hack through
the roof of the mammoth Villaggio mall to reach the childcare facility, where the victims
included two-year-old New Zealand triplets and three Spanish
siblings. Two firefighters also
were killed.
An editorial in the newspaper Al Arab urged officials

Children leave flowers during a memorial close to the scene where 19 people perished in a massive fire that tore
through a nursery at a Qatar shopping mall in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday. photos: Osama Faisal/the associated press
Lives lost

Tragedy

“Lillie, Jackson and Willsher came into this world
together and were the joy
of our life. Tragically, they
left together after only two
short years.”
A statement from the parents of the twoyear-old New Zealand triplets who perished
in the fire

around the Gulf to consider
creating special firefighting
and civil defence units for the
energy-rich region’s huge malls.
Qatar’s Interior Ministry
said the mall’s sprinkler system
malfunctioned, and rescue ef-

forts were hampered by a lack
of floor plans.
Other Gulf nations also have
confronted concerns about
whether public safety planning
can keep pace with the rapid
construction. the associated press

More than three-quarters
of Qatar’s population of 1.8
million residents are foreign
workers.
• The young victims include
a three-year-old French
child, four Spanish
children, an 18-month-old
South African toddler and
the New Zealand triplets.
• Three nursery teachers
from the Philippines died
from smoke inhalation.
A South African woman
who worked at the centre
also died.

Montreal. Wall of rain
causes flash floods,
power failure across city
Weather woes

• Environment Canada said
between 40 and 80 millimetres of rain had fallen
on the city.

Global pariah. Any
remaining envoys in
Ottawa have five days
to leave the country,
Foreign Minister says

• Federal meteorologist
Andre Cantin said it was
the kind of event that
occurs in a city once every
five to 10 years.
• The worst downpour during the rush hour caused
a shutdown of the VilleMarie tunnel, one of the
city’s busiest expressways.

what looked like puffy, swirling white clouds.
The rain overwhelmed the
city’s aging infrastructure
in some places, with water
pushing up through manhole
covers and sometimes lifting
them up.
By the time it was over,
there were cars partly submerged in what looked like
little lakes, while a pool of
water covered several subway
stations.
the canadian press

Bystander’s
video prompts
review of police
shooting case

Canada joined allies across
the world Tuesday in expelling Syrian diplomats, as the
slaughter of the innocent in
Houla provoked a broad severing of global ties with the
pariah Assad regime in Damascus.
Foreign Affairs Minister
John Baird said Canada was
expelling Syrian diplomats in Two people walk past the Syrian embassy in downtown Ottawa. Canada
the wake of the weekend mas- moved to expel all Syrian diplomats on Tuesday. adrian wyld/the canadian press
sacre in Houla. The United
Nations said 108 people died ordinated diplomatic offen- ently the massacre included
in the massacre, including 49 sive along with the United the close-range shootings of
children and 34 women — States, Britain, Australia, scores of children and parGermany,
Italy, ents in their homes.
one of the deadliest events France,
The report did not specify
in the 15-month uprising Spain, Bulgaria and the Nethagainst
Syrian
President erlands as the UN revealed who carried out most of the
Bashar Assad’s regime.
T:10”more gruesome details of killings.
Canada took part in a co- the events in Houla. Appar- the canadian press

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A dramatic new video of
a Vancouver police officer
fatally shooting a man on
a busy street almost five
years ago has prompted the
force to ask an independent investigative body from
Alberta to take another look
at the case.
The Alberta Serious
Incident Response Team, an
independent body that investigates allegations involving officers in that province,
will review a newly released
bystander’s video of Paul
Boyd’s fatal confrontation in
August 2007, the Vancouver
police and the B.C. government announced Tuesday.
Boyd was shot after
police responding to 911
calls were confronted by a
man swinging a bike chain.
Const. Lee Chipperfield testified he believed Boyd was
still armed when he fired
the fatal shot to Boyd’s head.
But a video, shot by
a Winnipeg tourist and
released to the media this
week, appears to show Boyd
was no longer holding the
bike chain when he was
killed. the canadian press

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A wall of rain collapsed onto
Montreal in one torrential
instant that flooded city
streets, closed subway stations, caused power failures,
damaged private property
and forced evacuations from
public buildings Tuesday.
It took only a few minutes to transform downtown
streets into miniature canals.
The foul odour of overflowing
sewage floated over the area
near the port.
Many thousands of people
were affected. While some
scooped water from their
own basements, much larger
buildings were evacuated including a fancy downtown
hotel, the Quebec provincial
library, multiple university
pavilions, commercial centres and a large part of the
metro system.
More than 28,000 people
lost electricity in Quebec,
with more than half those
disruptions occurring in the
province’s biggest city.
The brief but powerful
storm saw a sunny afternoon
lapse into night-like darkness. A solid slab of water
crashed through the air, eventually bursting sideways in

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Hearing-impaired (TTY): 1-800-361-8071. Total prices displayed now include taxes, fees, charges and surcharges and are based on nonstop ﬂights. Where Air Canada does not operate nonstop ﬂights, the total price may vary depending on itinerary. Some itineraries may require
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14
Mass killer

Breivik’s friends
suspect he’s gay
Is confessed Norwegian
mass killer Anders Behring Breivik gay?
Former friends of Breivik say he often expressed
feminine tendencies and
led some to believe he
may be gay.
Three of the 33-yearold’s former friends told
an Oslo court on Tuesday
that five years before he
massacred 77 people in
July, he moved back to
live with his mother and
ended all social contacts.
The friends, who did
not want to be named,
gave testimony during
Breivik’s trial as the
defendant watched in an
adjoining room.
Breivik killed 69
people in a shooting spree
on Utoya island on July 22
after setting off a bomb
in Oslo that claimed eight
lives.
the associated press

news

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Again! Just nine days later, new
quake misery hits northern Italy
Terror strikes at
9 a.m. Factories, barns,
warehouses crumple
— and the number
of homeless swells
to more than 14,000
A powerful earthquake dealt
a second terrifying blow
Tuesday to a quake-devastated
region in northern Italy.
Just nine days after an earlier earthquake that killed
seven
people,
Tuesday’s
quake killed at least 17 and
left 200 injured.
Factories,
warehouses,
barns and churches collapsed.
The
temblor
shocked
many of the thousands who
have been living in tents or
cars since the May 20 quake

and created a whole new
wave of homeless people.
The area encompassing the
cities of Modena, Mantua and
Bologna is prized for its super
car production — churning
out Ferraris, Maseratis and
Lamborghinis — its worldfamous Parmesan cheese, and
less well-known but critical
to the economy: machinery
companies.
In Mirandola, the church
of San Francis crumbled, leaving only its facade standing.
The main cathedral also collapsed.
In Concordia, the mayor
had scheduled a town meeting to discuss the aftermath
of the first quake.
Instead,
Mayor
Carlo
Marchini
confirmed
the death of one person
struck by falling debris.
the associated press

Rescue workers send dogs into the wreckage of a quake-hit factory in Medolla, northern Italy, on Tuesday
as they search for three workers reported missing. luca bruno/the associated press

NATO claim. Airstrike
kills al-Qaida’s No. 2
leader in Afghanistan
The U.S.-led NATO force in
Afghanistan says it has killed
al-Qaida’s
second-highest
leader in the country.
Sakhr al-Taifi died in an
airstrike in the eastern Kunar
province, the force said Tuesday.
Al-Taifi — also known as
Mushtaq and Nasim — was
responsible for commanding
foreign insurgents in Afghanistan and directing attacks
against NATO and Afghan
forces, officials said.
He frequently travelled between Afghanistan and Pakistan, carrying out commands
from senior al-Qaida leadership and ferrying in weapons
and fighters.
The airstrike took place
Sunday in Kunar’s Watahpur district. A follow-up
assessment of the area determined that no civilians were
harmed, officials said.
They declined to reveal
the name of al-Qaida’s top
leader in Afghanistan “due
to ongoing operations and security concerns.”
Elsewhere in Afghanistan,

Safe haven?

Most of al-Qaida’s senior
leaders are now believed to
be based in Pakistan.
• Many senior al-Qaida

commanders have died
in American drone
attacks in Pakistan’s
northwest tribal region.

• Al-Qaida leader Osama

bin Laden was killed by
U.S. commandos in the
Pakistan town of Abbottabad last May.

two would-be suicide bombers riding in a vehicle packed
with explosives in the eastern
Nangarhar province were
killed when the vehicle exploded prematurely.
Three others in the vehicle
were severely wounded.
The explosion occurred on
the main highway between
Jalalabad city and Torkham, a
town on the Pakistani border.

Police baffled

Face-chewing
witness speaks
A witness who saw a
naked man chewing on
the face of another naked
man on a Miami highway
ramp has revealed grisly
details about the attack.
“The guy was … tearing him to pieces with his
mouth,” Larry Vega said.
“The guy just kept
eating the other guy away,
like, ripping his skin.’’
Police shot and killed
the attacker, Rudy Eugene, 31. The victim is in
critical condition.
the associated press

Six kids perish

Parents arrested
over fatal U.K. fire
Police have arrested the
parents of six children
who died in a fire at their
home, and say they are
now murder suspects.
Derbyshire police
allege the fire broke out
after fuel was poured
through the front door
mail slot.
the associated press

the associated press

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Student protest
leader may face up
to one year in prison
Anarchy?
Quebec. Fellow
student who filed court
a citizen you have
motion says complaint “As
to start worrying when
is not a vendetta
people say, ‘There’s a

Could the most prominent figure in Quebec’s protest movement face jail time for having
encouraged students to keep
schools shut?
Gabriel
Nadeau-Dubois
pleaded not guilty to a contempt-of-court charge Tuesday
in a Quebec City courtroom
and dismissed the idea that
he should be imprisoned for
his student activism. His opponents in the case said that’s
exactly what he deserves.
The charge stems from a
court motion filed by JeanFrancois Morasse, who alleges
Nadeau-Dubois
encouraged
students to ignore a court injunction that paved the way
for Morasse to return to class
at Universite Laval in Quebec
City.

The contempt-of-court case
focuses on remarks NadeauDubois made on television on
May 13. At the time, NadeauDubois said it was legitimate
for protesters to form picket
lines to keep students who had
obtained injunctions from getting to their classrooms.
Nadeau-Dubois is a cospokesman for the CLASSE student group — the most radical
of the province’s three biggest
student associations. He has
been featured in international
news reports and been de-

scribed, arguably inaccurately,
as a protest leader.
“Let’s hope this isn’t a political settling of accounts. That
would be very unfortunate,”
Nadeau-Dubois told reporters
at the courthouse.
“The vehemence with
which the other party is talking about a prison sentence —
well, let’s just say it leads one
to believe there’s an element
of frustration there.”
The
Quebec
protests
have lasted 15 weeks, during which nearly one-third of
post-secondary students have
remained away from the classrooms during a battle against
tuition hikes. Most students
remained in school, while
some were ordered to return
by court injunctions. Some
of the more ardent protesters
blocked attempts to reopen
classrooms.
The student dispute has
caused considerable unrest,
including confrontations between police and protesters in
the streets. THE CANADIAN PRESS

On the 107th day of a
student conflict creating
social tensions in Quebec,
government officials are
confirming that Premier
Jean Charest finally sat
down and met student leaders face to face.
Charest took part in a
discussion with student
leaders for more than 50
minutes late Monday, government officials confirmed
Tuesday.
It was an abrupt change
in approach for a premier
who had repeatedly resisted
opposition calls to get
personally involved in talks
with students — and who
had even avoided shaking
the hand of student leaders
during a recent event at the
legislature.
The apparent thaw came
as the government and protest leaders returned to the
negotiating table Monday
after a nearly one-month
hiatus. Charest characterized that meeting as a new
stage in the dispute. He
described the exchanges as
respectful and courteous.
THE CANADIAN PRESS

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18

HOW WILL NGOs
BREAK WITH
LONG-HELD
TRADITIONS
TO ASSUME
A NEW ROLE?

SHIFTING GEARS

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Robots equipped
with scissors, forceps
crawling in patients
Medical advances.
Doctors say robots have
potential to do things
humans can’t, such as
test blood in the body
Imagine a tiny snake robot
crawling through your body,
helping a surgeon identify diseases and perform operations.
It’s not science fiction. Scientists and doctors are using
the creeping metallic tools to
perform surgery on hearts,
prostate cancer, and other diseased organs. The snakebots
carry tiny cameras, scissors
and forceps, and even more
advanced sensors are in the
works. For now, they’re powered by tethers that humans
control. But experts say the day
is coming when some robots
will roam the body on their
own.
“It won’t be very long before we have robots that are

‘Snakebots’
• The size of surgical robots
allows surgeons to operate
with far less damage to the
body, helping the patient
heal faster. For example,
instead of opening the
entire chest up during heart
surgery, a small incision is
made, and the robot crawls
inside to the proper spot.
• Dr. Ashutosh Tewari of
Cornell University Medical
Center has used robotic
tools to perform thousands
of prostate operations. He
said the precision of the
tiny robotic tool is vital not
just to cutting out cancerous tumors, but to seeing
exactly what nerves to leave
intact.

nanobots, meaning they will
actually be inside the body
without tethers,” said Dr. Mi-

chael Argenziano, the chief of
adult cardiac surgery at New
York-Presbyterian Hospital and
Columbia University Medical
Center in New York.
Argenziano was involved
with some of the first U.S. Food
and Drug Administration clinical trials on robotic heart surgery more than 10 years ago.
Now he says snake robots have
become a commonly used tool
that gives surgeons a whole
new perspective.
“It’s like the ability to have
little hands inside the patients,
as if the surgeon had been
shrunken, and was working on
the heart valve,” he said.
Another expert at Carnegie
Mellon stresses that there’s
still an enormous gap between
humans and even the most
high-tech robots. Manuela
Velosa noted that robots have
been built that excel at one
or two tasks — but not at the
variety of tasks humans perform without even thinking.
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Greece’s culture ministry says
two Roman-era shipwrecks
found in deep waters off
the country’s western coast
disprove the accepted theory
that ancient shipmasters
stuck to coastal routes rather
than risking the open sea.

Idaho liquor regulators say
a Utah liquor named Five
Wives Vodka is in bad taste
and they won’t stock bottles or take special orders
at state-owned stores. It’s
from a distillery in Utah,
where the Mormon church
is based. the associated press

A light spewing of ash
amid renewed rumblings
in the Nevado del Ruiz
volcano has prompted
Colombian authorities
to suspend operations
at four regional airports
and evacuate 500 people.

the associated press

the associated press

news

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

19

How to restore
the voters’
shattered trust?
Election chiefs’ top
priority. Robocall
scandal may spark
legislative changes to
curb live call centres,
chief officer says
Restoring trust in the integrity
of the electoral system is a top
priority for Elections Canada.
The watchdog agency aims
to repair damage inflicted
by the robocall scandal and
procedural irregularities that
caused the election in one Toronto riding to be overturned.
Chief electoral officer Marc
Mayrand said Tuesday the
agency is reviewing its procedures.
It may yet recommend
legislative changes to deal

spring’s election is continuing
but, regardless of its outcome,
Mayrand said the agency intends to recommend improvements to the Canada Elections
Act to deal with the use of
new technologies. That includes the use of phone banks.
Mayrand said Elections
Canada is also moving to address problems exposed by a
recent court ruling that overturned the result in Toronto’s
Etobicoke Centre.
Judge Thomas Lederer set
aside 79 ballots due to clerical
errors, primarily involving
improperly filled-out voter
registration and vouching certificates, some of which have
disappeared altogether.
The Conservatives, who
won the riding by just 26
votes, are appealing the ruling
to the Supreme Court.

Flurry of complaints

1,100

In the robocall case, Mayrand told a
House of Commons committee that
Elections Canada has now received 1,100
complaints from voters who say they
received harassing or misleading phone
calls directing them to phoney polling
stations during last spring’s election.

with the problems.
Among the possible solutions, he said, are regulating
the manner in which automated and live call centres
are used to contact voters
and ensuring exorbitant legal
costs don’t prevent individuals from challenging dubious
election results.
The investigation into complaints of robocalls during last

the canadian press

By thunder, that’s a rainstorm
Talk about water, water everywhere.… Thunder Bay got more than its share this week. Heavy rains and flooding forced the city to declare a state of emergency as homes were flooded and sewer systems worked at full
capacity. Here, city workers Steve Alexander and Silvio Pratola clear debris from a storm drain.
brent linton/thunder bay chronicle-journal/the canadian press

Soaring toll

70,000 seals were
killed in this year’s
hunt, minister says
Newfoundland and Labrador’s fisheries minister says
70,000 harp seals have been
killed during this year’s
commercial seal hunt.
That’s nearly twice the
number killed last year.

Darin King told the
provincial legislature that
680 sealers took part in this
year’s hunt, which had an
allowable catch of 400,000.
About 38,000 harp seals
were killed last year.
King says he believes the
higher catch level reflects an
opening of markets in Asia,
an argument animal-rights
groups contest.
Earlier this year, the
provincial government

announced a $3.6-million
loan to Carino Processing
Ltd., a seal-products company, in a bid to kick-start
the hunt. The funds went
toward buying seal pelts and
blubber.
The hunt normally opens
in March around the Magdalen Islands and Prince Edward Island and later off the
east coast of Newfoundland.
It’s usually over by May.
the canadian press

20

news

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Candidate cashing in on resentment of rival
Egypt. Old regime
dealing with
angry protesters in
presidential runoff
The Muslim Brotherhood’s
candidate for the Egyptian
presidential runoff promised Tuesday he would break
sharply with the ways of ousted autocrat Hosni Mubarak,
a day after angry protesters
burned down the headquarters of his challenger who
served as prime minister in
the old regime.
Islamist Mohammed Morsi
appeared to be trying to cash
in on public resentment of his
rival Ahmed Shafiq’s ties to

Mubarak at a news conference
where he offered something
for everyone, from the military to the revolutionaries,
women and minority Christians. Morsi has been scrambling to broaden his base of
support ahead of the June 1617 runoff.
“When I am president, the
presidency will not be reduced
to one person,” he said. “The
age of superman has failed
and gone. The world is no
longer like that. I am not like
that.”
Morsi’s comments came
hours after some 400 protesters chanting slogans against
Shafiq stormed and vandalized his Cairo campaign
headquarters. The protesters
set the building ablaze after

Quoted

“More than anyone
else, the Brotherhood
makes promises it never
keeps.”
Girgis Atef, a veteran of the uprising that
toppled Mubarak 15 months ago

making away with computers,
television sets and air conditioners.
Shafiq was the last prime
minister appointed by Mubarak before he stepped down
in February 2011 in the face
of a popular uprising against
his autocratic rule. The attack on Shafiq’s headquarters
was reminiscent of some of
the most dramatic scenes of

the uprising when protesters
burned down the ruling party
headquarters.
In Cairo’s Tahrir Square,
birthplace of the uprising,
protesters chanted slogans
against both Morsi and Shafiq.
Similar protests took place in
the Mediterranean port city of
Alexandria and elsewhere in
northern Egypt.
Morsi claimed the top spot
in the first round of landmark
elections last week, putting
him in the runoff against
Shafiq who, like his longtime
friend and mentor Mubarak, is
a former air force commander.
The attack on Shafiq’s
headquarters underlined the
depth of resentment felt by
many toward Shafiq, viewed
by critics as an extension of

The revolutionary youth of Egypt returned to Tahrir Square to protest the
outcome of the Egyptian presidential election in Cairo on Monday.
Fredrik Persson/The Associated Press

the Mubarak regime. And
Morsi moved quickly to use
it for political gain, making a

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host of generous promises he
said he would keep if elected.
The Associated Press

news

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

21

State of emergency lifted in Kirkland Lake
Forest fire.
10-kilometre-long
blaze on the edge of
town downgraded to
‘being held’
The state of emergency for the
northeastern Ontario town of
Kirkland Lake has been lifted
after fire crews managed to
surround a nearby forest fire.
Firefighters have been battling a large fire on the northern edge of town for the past
10 days. The fire has been as
close as three kilometres to
the community of more than
9,000 people.
But on Tuesday morning,
the status of the fire was

downgraded to “being held”
as crews managed to surround the 10-kilometre-long
blaze with fire hose.
The community came
through just fine, said Mayor
Bill Enouy, who also thanked
emergency workers including
provincial police, hydro workers and staff from the Ministry of Natural Resources.
“I think we got our message out not to panic and
to be prepared and I think
people bought into that,”
Enouy said Tuesday.
“It was a really good experience other than the fact
that it was a bad experience,
if you know what I mean.”
Calling a state of emergency allowed the town to get
extra help from the police,

Conditions improving

• Hundreds of residents
were forced to flee their
homes, cottages and
camps near Timmins and
Kirkland Lake over the last
week as the fires raged.
Some have been allowed
to return but many are

hydro and support staff at
the ministries involved, the
mayor said.
But now that the emergency order is lifted, residents
can get back to some normalcy, said Sgt. Dana McLean
of Ontario Provincial Police.
“State
of
emergency
means that things aren’t hap-

still waiting for the allclear.
• Emergency officials have

said that while conditions
have improved, access to
at-risk areas will likely be
limited for some time.

pening within the town,” she
said.
“Everything sort of goes
in a hold pattern. So your
real estate is stalled, loans
are stalled. A lot of things are
stalled in the day-to-day lives
of people. Now those lives can
go back to normal.”
Provincial police say they

OPP Officers gather for a briefing at the OPP Command Post just a few
kilometres west of Timmins, Ont., last Friday. A state of emergency for the
nearby town of Kirkland Lake has been lifted. Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press

have determined the fire was
started by campers in a recreational area and are asking

for the public’s help identifying those responsible.
The canadian Press

22

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news

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Pianist preps for marathon:
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Classical pianist Stewart Goodyear is gearing up to make history by teaming musical skill
and physical endurance in a 10hour performance of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas.
To perform the 103 individual movements in one day has
been a dream since he was a
young child, Goodyear said in
an interview after a rehearsal
for reporters at Toronto’s
Koerner Hall, where the marathon will take place.
Goodyear is performing
his “Beethoven Marathon” in
Toronto on June 9 as part of
Luminato, a multidisciplinary
festival of arts and creativity
that runs June 8 to 17.
The sonatas of Beethoven,
said to be a pinnacle of the solo
piano repertoire, lend themselves to the one-day extrava-

ganza, which will take place in
three concerts.
Goodyear’s father died a
month before he was born, but
he left behind a wide range of
music that captured his precocious young son’s interest.
“I grew up surrounded by
music. I came from a very eclectic musical background,” said
Goodyear, who is also a composer. “My father had LPs ranging from Cat Stevens to Led
Zeppelin to the Rolling Stones
to the Beatles and I was listening to those LPs as well as two
boxes of records. One box were
the complete Tchaikovsky symphonies and the other box was
Beethoven.”
He performed his first
Beethoven piano sonata at age
10 for a Kiwanis Music Festival
and he hasn’t looked back.
Goodyear, now 34, studied
at the Royal Conservatory of
Music before receiving a bachelor’s degree from the Curtis
Institute of Music in Philadelphia and then a master’s degree at the prestigious Juilliard
School of Music in New York.
He performs with orchestras
around the world.
the canadian press

Classical pianist Stewart Goodyear is gearing up to make history by
teaming musical skill and physical endurance in a 10-hour performance of
Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. the canadian press/handout

Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha stand for the national anthem during a college basketball game at
Howard University on Nov. 27, 2010, in Washington, D.C. olivier douliery/pool/getty images

Obama girls need thick
skin, says first lady
White House.
Daughters Malia, Sasha
in a good place no
matter the outcome of
presidential election:
Michelle Obama
Michelle Obama says her
daughters are learning that
even the kids of politicians

have to have a thick skin.
“Politics is tough,” the first
lady said Tuesday. “That’s
just sort of the nature of the
beast.”
But she said daughters Sasha and Malia, at ages 10 and
13, also know that no matter
what happens in the November election, “their life is
good either way.”
As for the personal attacks that swirl around her
husband in a campaign year,

Obama said: “You just sort of
have to have a thick skin in
this thing. And your kids do
too.”
Malia and Sasha “understand that their world is
secure no matter what,”
she said on ABC’s The View.
”They’ve grown to understand that home is wherever
we are ... and Dad is always
going to be Dad. So they’re
good.”
the associated press

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24

news

The old, the young
and the age of change
Census. Toddlers
bust a move, but the
oldsters just keep
on coming, and the
implications are only
beginning to sink in
Canada is becoming a nation
of the aging and the very
young.
New census data shows
Canada now has a higher proportion of seniors than ever
before — a development that
has crept up on society with
far-reaching implications for
health, finance, policy and
everyday family relationships.
At the same time, the
latest tranche of 2011 census
information shows a surprising 11 per cent resurgence of
toddlers — a burst of growth
in the under-five population
that is a complete reversal of
trend-lines a decade ago and
is rejuvenating every region
of the country.
“I wouldn’t call it a baby
boom, although I think we
can call it a significant increase,” Laurent Martel, a
demography expert at Statistics Canada, said in an interview.
Generally, though, the
census shows in great detail
what most people already
know intuitively: Canada is
aging quickly as the baby
boomers mature.
The population of over65ers has surged to nearly
five million over the past five
years, growing 14.1 per cent
since the last official count,
Statistics Canada says.
That’s more than double
the 5.9-per-cent increase for
the population as a whole.
It’s a trend that’s poised to
take on momentum. That’s
because
near-seniors
—
people aged 60 to 64 — grew
faster than any other group.
Their population soared 29.1
per cent over the past five

years, a pattern that will persist as they move up the age
ladder.
They are the oldest edge
of the baby-boom generation
that includes three out of 10
Canadians, and has so dramatically shaped Canada’s
landscape for decades.
Young people, on the
other hand, are a stagnating
generation — despite the torrent of toddlers. The under-15
cohort is barely expanding,
having edged up just 0.5 per

cent over the past five years.
Children under 15 make
up just 16.7 per cent of the
population now, while seniors are at a record high of
14.8 per cent, and growing.
In just four years, Canada
will face what demographers
have dubbed “the cross-over”:
The day when there are more
seniors than children.
The median age in Canada
is now 40.6, the oldest ever, up
from 39.5 five years ago and
from 33.5 two decades ago.

Canada’s
population
aging is a mix of longer lives
and a growing number of
people in their senior years,
Martel said.
In 2011, there were 4,870
women and 955 men aged
100 or more — the secondfastest growing age group
with a 25.7-per-cent rate of
expansion. By 2031, StatsCan projects the number
of centenarians will reach
17,000, rising to close to
80,000 by 2061 as the bulk
of the remaining baby
boomers moves into the triple digits.
Compared to other G8
countries, Canada’s population is relatively young, and
the proportion of seniors in
Canada is among the lowest
in the G8.
That’s about to change,
Martel warned: Canada had
a bigger baby boom than
other countries, and as
people retire in droves, Canada’s aging trend will pick
up speed. THE CANADIAN PRESS

More Canadians, it seems,
are changing dirty diapers, serving up spoonfuls
of mushy peas and getting
tongue-tied over Dr. Seuss
books before bed, if the
latest census figures from
Statistics Canada are any
indication.
Previously released
population statistics show
more people in Canada
are having children.
The national birth rate
increased slightly from
1.59 in 2006 to 1.67 in
2009. In Alberta, the rate
is among the highest of
the provinces; it was 1.8
in 2010.
Not surprisingly, the
latest increase was felt
most profoundly in the
Prairies, which have
become magnets for jobseeking, working-age families looking for a place to
put down roots.
In Alberta, the growth
rate among kids four and
under was 20.9 per cent,
followed by Saskatchewan
at 19.6 per cent. Quebec
also posted a strong
increase at 17.5 per cent,
as did Nunavut at 15.7 per
cent.
Another reason for
Canada’s baby bump may
simply be that there are
more moms. Statistics
Canada attributed the
spike to modestly higher
fertility rates in most regions, as well as a growing
number of women aged
20 to 34 — traditional
child-rearing years.
THE CANADIAN PRESS

On the web
Go to metronews.ca/features to:
• Take the census 2011 quiz.
• Check out the interactive
graphic on population
projections by age and sex
from 1971-2061.
• See the communities map
for an interactive breakdown
of the data city by city.
• Watch videos. Canadians say just “how
old is old?”; seniors
give longevity tips.

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

news

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Jason Franson/the canadian press

0.99:1

The ratio of people aged
15-24 compared to people
aged 55-64 in 2011. In 1931,
that ratio stood at 2.95:1.

5,825

The number of people in Canada
aged 100 and older in 2011.
Centenarians have been on the
rise over the last decade, with
3,795 in 2001. But a big jump is
coming, according to Statistics
Canada projections, with the
country on its way to seeing
78,300 centenarians in 2061.

2016

The year Statistics Canada
projects children under 14 will,
for the first time, be outnumbered by seniors. This despite
the efforts of a very active
Alberta, which saw an increase
of 20.9 per cent in the number
of children aged four and under
between 2006 and 2011.

40.6

In years, Canada’s median age
in 2011 — the age at which one
half the population is older
and the other half is younger.
In 2006, it was 39.5.

25

Women are turning
the big, big wheels
Kolby Nepoose has had a lot of
jobs at places that would probably sound familiar to many
young women — grocery store,
health-care centre, coffee shop,
bank.
Eventually, though, the lure
of sitting at a desk began to
fade.
“I just found my work really
tedious, sitting at the computer
all day,” said Nepoose, 25.
So she found something
different — way different.
She now works at Mammoet,
a Dutch multinational that
builds and operates heavy
lift and transport equipment.
Nepoose — booted, hard-hatted and overalled — is working
towards a journeyman’s ticket
as a crane operator.
Workers like Nepoose are
still rare: In 2007, only about
two per cent of those employed
in non-service-sector trades
were women. But those numbers are increasing.
JudyLynn Archer is trying
to be part of that solution. She
leads an Edmonton organization called Women Building Futures, which offers pre-apprenticeship programs to introduce
women to trades from carpentry to welding to pipefitting.
A total of 3,000 women
contacted Women Building

Renee Jones, first-year apprentice crane operator, is seen on a RT 65-tonne crane
that she operates at Mammoet, in Edmonton. Jason Franson/THE CANADIAN PRESS
Quoted

Women “drive
with less ego.”
JudyLynn Archer of Women Building
Futures, who said employers tell her women
are easier on heavy equipment — more
vigilant with preventative maintenance and
safety checks and gentler on the huge and
hugely expensive tires the big stuff rolls on.

Futures last year looking for information on the trades. About
190 from across Canada are
expected to graduate this year,
almost all directly into jobs or
apprenticeships.

“If we had 2,000 today, they
could all be placed, working,”
Archer said. “The demand is
unbelievable.”
Women are fitting in just
fine on job sites across the
province, she added.
Companies “are very happy
with their female employees.
They show up every day, they
have a strong attention to detail and they’re more loyal.”
Still, she said, employers are
just starting to see women as
part of the solution to Canada’s
coming shortage of skilled
labour.
THE CANADIAN PRESS

How old is old? ‘It’s how you feel’
Ask Alan Wilson to define
“old” and he answers with a
hearty chuckle.
“It’s just a number; it’s
how you feel,” said Wilson, a
spry 82-year-old who teaches
line-dancing classes at a seniors’ recreation centre in
Peterborough, Ont.
“I had a heart attack 10
years ago and that didn’t
hold me back at all.”
To Wilson and many of his
friends, being old is a state of

mind — one that Canada’s
increasingly active senior
set is choosing to ignore as
the leading edge of the baby
boom reaches the traditional
retirement age of 65.
So, it’s a fair question:
How old is old?
The point at which health
concerns become real-life
realities is when a person
can truly be considered
“old,” said Susan Eng, vicepresident for advocacy at

the Canadian Association of
Retired Persons (CARP), Canada’s leading seniors’ advocacy organization.
“Where the rubber hits
the road is when old becomes
a limitation,” said Eng.
And rather than deny that
true old age — with its eventual drawbacks — will hit
them one day, it’s vital that
modern seniors embrace
their aging, she added.
THE CANADIAN PRESS

26

business

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Home affordability
deteriorating: RBC
Mortgages. Toronto,
Montreal and Ottawa
follow same trend
It’s getting more difficult to
pay for the costs of owning a
home in Canada and the situation will likely worsen, the
Royal Bank said Tuesday.
The RBC reports that rising
house prices were responsible

Chromebooks

Google to release
new laptops
Google will try to win more
converts to a computer
operating system revolving around its popular
Chrome web browser with
a new wave of lightweight
laptops built by Samsung
Electronics.
Unlike most computers,
Google’s Chromebooks
don’t have a hard drive.
They function like terminals dependent on an Internet connection. The laptops
come with 16 gigabytes of
flash memory — the kind
found in smartphones,
tablet computers and some
iPods.

for a modest deterioration
in home affordability in the
first few months of 2012 after
two quarterly improvements,
but warns that rising interest
rates are the more pressing
concern long-term.
In Toronto, the index deteriorated by 1.2 percentage
points to 53.4 per cent based
on $110,000 in annual income.
the canadian press

Dutch lawmakers adopted
a motion Tuesday urging
the government not
Premier Dalton McGuinty tries his hand at aircraft assembly during a media tour of Bombardier’s manufacturto sign a controversial
ing facility in Toronto on Tuesday to celebrate 20 years of manufacturing, research, development and investinternational treaty aimed
ment in Ontario. The CEO of transportation giant Bombardier Inc., Pierre Beaudoin, believes that, with some
at reining in online piracy,
innovation, Ontario can turn around a slump in its manufacturing sector, adding that his company has enough
another setback for the
work orders to maintain staffing levels at its plants in the province. Bombardier first invested in the province
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade
through the purchase of de Havilland and the Urban Transportation Development Corp. in 1992 during another
crisis in the manufacturing sector. Agreement.
Michelle Siu/the canadian press

the associated press

business

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Russian researchers
discover massive
new cyber-weapon
‘Flame.’ Virus can turn
infected computers
into listening devices
and even have them
suck information out
of nearby cellphones
A
massive
data-slurping
cyber-weapon is circulating
in the Middle East, a Russian Internet-security firm
reported Monday, saying that
computers in Iran appear to
have been particularly affected.
The
virus,
dubbed
“Flame,” is unprecedented
both in terms of its size and
complexity,
Moscow-based
Kaspersky Lab ZAO reported,
saying it possesses the ability
to turn infected computers
into listening devices and
even suck information out
from nearby cellphones.
The announcement sent a
ripple of excitement across the
c o m puter-

security sector. Flame is the
third major cyber-weapon
discovered in the past two
years, and Kaspersky’s conclusion that it was crafted at
the behest of a national government fuelled speculation
that the virus could be part of
an Israeli-backed campaign of
electronic sabotage aimed at
archrival Iran.
Some evidence suggests
that the people behind Flame
also helped craft Stuxnet,
a notorious virus that disrupted controls of some
nuclear centrifuges in Iran
in 2010, according to Ilan
Froimovici, the technical director at Power Communications, which represents Kaspersky in Israel.
The two codes “use the
same vulnerabilities in the
operating system and the computer infrastructure in order
to infect the computer system.
“We do believe that the
same programmers built the
two codes,” said Froimovici.
Stuxnet revolutionized the
cybersecurity field because it
targeted physical infrastructure rather than data, one
of the first demonstrations
of how savvy hackers can
take control of industrial
systems to wreak havoc.
Unlike
Stuxnet,
Flame appears focused
on
espionage,
Kaspersky said.
The virus can

Market Minute
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OIL
$90.76 US (-10¢)

GOLD
$1,548.70 US (-$20.20)

‘Very unusual’ virus

Alan Woodward, a professor
of computing at the University of Surrey in southern
England, compared the
virus to a smartphone —
depending on what kind of
espionage you want to carry
out, “you just add apps.”
• He said Flame can turn

an infected computer
into a kind of “industrial
vacuum cleaner,” copying data from vulnerable
cellphones or other
devices left near it.

activate a computer’s audio systems to eavesdrop on
Skype calls or office chatter,
for example. It can also take
screenshots, log keystrokes,
and — in one of its more
novel functions — suck data
from Bluetooth-enabled cellphones.
Iran has not disclosed any
data lost to the new virus, but
Israel’s vice-premier did little
to deflect suspicion about
possible Israeli involvement
in the latest attack.
“Whoever sees the Iranian
threat as a significant threat
is likely to take various steps,
including these, to hobble it,”
Israeli Vice Premier Moshe
Yaalon told Army Radio
when asked about
Flame. “Israel is blessed
with high technology,
and we boast tools that
open all sorts of opportunities for us.”
The

associated
Press

27

Natural gas: $2.517 US (-5.1¢)
Dow Jones: 12,580.69 (+125.86)

The Nest Learning Thermostat, shown above, went on sale for Canadians on
Tuesday for $249 US. the canadian press/handout

New Nest reaches
Canadian consumers
Are Canadian homeowners
ready to spring for a hightech,
premium-priced
thermostat, just as they’ve
embraced Apple’s slick but
pricey smartphones and tablets? Nest Learning Thermostat co-founder Tony Fadell
— the lead designer of the
iconic iPods and iPhones before leaving Apple in 2005 —
thinks so.
On Tuesday, Nest announced it has started accepting orders for its $249
US thermostat in Canada,
the first country outside
the U.S. to get access to the
buzzed-about product.
“We think of this as the
thermostat for the iPhone
generation,” Fadell said.
The Nest is also designed
to reduce energy bills — by
as much as
20 per cent,
the company
claims — easily and without
effort;
even
for consumers
who already
have a programmable
thermostat.

Wall Street

Facebook stock
falls below $30 US

The Nest doesn’t need to
be programmed and instead
learns what temperatures
owners like to keep their
home at during different
times. After a few days, the
unit will be able to go on
auto-pilot and automatically
shift the temperature up and
down, Fadell said.
It can also sense when
the house is empty and
turn down the furnace or
air conditioner, or users
can remotely make adjustments with a web browser
or app. Nest also claims it
can reduce air conditioner
usage by up to 30 per cent by
automatically turning off the
unit a few minutes early and
running the fan to circulate
cold air.

Facebook’s stock has fallen
below $30 US for the first
time since its much-awaited
public debut this month.
The stock fell $3.07,
or 9.6 per cent, to close at
$28.84 on Tuesday. That’s
down 24 per cent since its
debut. It went as low as
$28.65 earlier in the day.
It went as low as $29.23
earlier in the day. Facebook
Inc. began trading publicly
on May 18 following one
of the most anticipated
stock offerings in history.
Facebook’s initial public
offering of stock priced at
$38 and raised $16 billion
for Facebook and some of
its early investors. It had
valued the company at $104
billion — more than Amazon.com Inc. at the time.

the canadian press

the associated press

move with the markets.
Now the markets move
with me.

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smartphone – wherever you are.
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$150 cash will be deposited directly into your New Account and the commissions associated with your first 50 trades placed on or before 90 days from the date on which your New Account is funded with Minimum Amount B will be credited back to your New Account to a maximum amount of CAD $9.99 per trade (maximum commission rebate of up to CAD $499.50). Customer must enter the promotional code SPRING-MA online when submitting the New Account application. Customers who have
transferred CAD $25,000 or more out of Scotia iTRADE or TradeFreedom within the 2 months preceding the date on which the New Account is funded, do not qualify. You must be eligible to open a Scotia iTRADE account and maintain all of your accounts at Scotia iTRADE in good standing. This offer has no cash redemption value. This offer cannot be transferred or combined with any other promotional offer. Maximum of EITHER: (a) up to 25 free trades (maximum commission rebate of up to $249.75)
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Mobile Scotia iTRADE app during the Offer Period by Scotia iTRADE customers whose Scotia iTRADE accounts are in good standing. This offer has no cash redemption value. This offer cannot be transferred. Maximum of up to one commission rebate for the first equity trade and up to one commission rebate for the first option trade placed using the Mobile Scotia iTRADE app during the Offer Period, per Scotia iTRADE customer. Scotia iTRADE reserves the right to modify and/or cancel this offer at any time
without notice in its sole discretion.
iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.
Scotia iTRADE® (Order-Execution Only Accounts) is a division of Scotia Capital Inc. (“SCI”). SCI is a member of the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada and the Canadian Investor Protection Fund. System response and account access times may vary due to a variety of factors, including trading volumes, market conditions, system performance, and other factors. Scotia iTRADE does not provide investment advice or recommendations and investors are responsible for their own investment
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SCOITRC20032_Metro_Ad.indd 1

12-05-29 1:37 PM

PROJECT INFORMATION

DIGITAL FILE INFORMATION

PRINTING COLOUR / INKS

VERSION

28

voices

dads say the
darnedest
things
Justin Halpern is a testament
to the power of Twitter.
A lovable loser who was
Paul Sullivan
dumped by his girlfriend, he
metronews.ca/justsaying
moved back home and started
mining his father’s advice,
salted liberally with profanity, and tweeting it to his followers, who grew into the millions.
Eventually, that turned into a book contract, then a
book called S--t My Dad Says, then a sitcom starring William Shatner as “Dad,” now another book, this one called
I Suck at Girls. And he has already sold the TV rights.
As Dad says: “Any idiot can get lucky once. Takes a
special idiot to get lucky
twice.” Gee, thanks.
Father-son code
Oh, and Justin eventually
got — and married — the
My own dad preferred
girl, so maybe he doesn’t
to deliver his wisdom in actually suck at girls.
My own dad preferred to
code. He only ever said deliver
his wisdom in code.
two things to me. 1)
He only ever said two things
Pass the salt and 2) Get to me. 1) Pass the salt and 2)
Get a job.
a job.
After a while, the charm
of wondering whether any
request for advice was going to be met with either option
1) or 2) wore off, and I stopped asking. I mean, I already
had three jobs and always passed the salt. As far as I could
tell, following instructions failed to help with girls.
One of my earliest attempts at romance failed when
the object of my affections said I’d make “some girl a
great husband.” Which at the time sounded like a crushing put down. Which it was. Even worse, I’m not even
sure my actual wife would agree.
Justin says that when his wife-to-be broke up with him
the first time, it was his lucky day. Otherwise he never
would have moved back home and tweeted Dirty Dad to
riches and fame.
I had the same kind of bittersweet formative love life:
When I was 16, I met a terrific girl with terrific red hair
and a terrific itsy-bitsy teeny-weenie yellow polka dot
bikini. Unfortunately, she also came with a psychopath
named Ray who owned a Harley.
So I was curious what Sam Halpern had to say about
the inhabitants of Venus.
Here’s the cleanest I could find. “No, you can be ugly
and get laid. You just gotta be willing to sc--w someone
uglier than you.” Dad’s a real piece of work.
I Suck at Girls is shot through with similarly colourful
bromides. At one point, when he was nine, Justin asked
Sam to explain the birds and the bees. “No,” said Sam.
“You don’t even have hair on your balls.”
I think I prefer “pass the salt” and “get a job.”
According to a recent survey, Justin and I aren’t the
only ones getting bad advice from Dad. Turns out only
31 per cent of Canadian women actually experience an
orgasm during sex, compared to 84 per cent of men.
Maybe we should all just get a job instead.

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Royal portrait is rubbish

just
sayin’

submitted

Perkins on her Queen art

Royalist art

The Queen has a
button nose — literally
Artist
Jane Perkins has
created
three
portraits
of the
Queen
Jane Perkins
made
submitted
from
unwanted buttons, beads
and small plastic toys.
The triptych depicts
the monarch in three
stages of life: during her
Coronation, Silver Jubilee
and Diamond Jubilee.
The above two are for the
Coronation and Diamond
Jubilee. Metro world news

• Sum of many parts. “I honestly
cannot say how many separate
items I have used in these
portraits. Generally speaking,
I use everything from small
plastic toys, beads, broken
jewelry, buttons, bottle tops
and other small found objects
to create my art. I get these
materials from car boot sales
and charity shops that can’t
sell them. I started out doing
this art while making brooches
in my final year in my degree
in textiles. I was inspired by
headdresses from Ecuador
used in religious processions,
many of which have been made
from Barbie doll parts. While I
don’t consider myself an ardent
royalist, I have enjoyed making
the portraits of the Queen, par-

ticularly as making the crown
with different shiny objects can
be a very creative process.”
• How it’s all pieced together. “It
doesn’t take too long to make
one portrait — only two weeks.
First, I blow up an image of the
person to a 70-by-50 centimetre
size, and start sticking the various objects on top of the blowups themselves. As the colour
of the blow-up photocopy is
often faded, I always have an
‘original’, smaller but higherresolution image to work from.
This way, I can stay true to the
original colours of the portraits
when I add my items.”

In numbers

129

is the number of portraits the
Queen has sat down for during
her reign. Lucien Freud’s
portrayal in 2001 proved to be
the most controversial, with
critics describing the sober
likeness as “extremely
unflattering.”

• Artistic philosophy. “I have
serious views about recycling
and reusing materials. We’re
drowning in so much unwanted
stuff.”

Twitter
Register at metropolitanpanel.ca
and take the quick poll

Did you tune in to the finale of the 11th
season of American Idol?
75%

No, ten
seasons
was enough

Justin Halpern Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

25%

Yes, as long
as they
churn them
out I’ll
watch

@ kjh200:
•••••
Got my Brett Lawrie shirt on reppin from my couch tonight for
the @BlueJays tonight. Big screen
isnt as sweet as the field but
close enough!
@nicholasmizera:
•••••
Would some deodorant company please start giving out antiperspirant samples at subway entrances? #ttc #Toronto

@prappafix:

•••••

Mike McCoy and Rajai Davis are
not best for #bluejays longterm
plans... This is a joke, Thames has
a better avg then half the team
@mattbraga:
•••••
Sounds like trouble is afoot at
Conservative Party HQ today.
@Proteautype:
•••••
Leafs sign KHLer Leo Komarov.
Somewhere, Harold Ballard is
charging other ghosts to watch
him spin in his grave.

‘We wanted to have a formidable silhouette,’ said costume designer Colleen Atwood. ‘And from a distance it’s spooky with the crown and her height and everything.’ CONTRIBUTED

Evil thoughts and threads
Snow White and the
Huntsman. Dressed to
kill — Charlize Theron
shines as a wicked
queen in beautiful but
‘treacherous’ costumes
Charlize Theron’s evil queen
costumes for Snow White and
the Huntsman called for hundreds of hand-cut rooster feathers, thousands of iridescent
beetle wings from Thailand
and one particularly imposing
crown.
The outfits, some of which
are on view at an LA pop-up gallery ahead of the film’s June 1
opening, represented a host of
firsts for Academy Award-winning costume designer Colleen
Atwood.
From the leather piping on
the pleats of the queen’s wedding gown to the gauzy green
metal trim on the beetle-wing
dress, the nine-time Oscar nominee and three-time winner ex-

perimented with materials for
director Rupert Sanders’ dark
take on the classic fairy tale.
“The idea of the fairy tale
sets you free in a way because
you can make it up,” Atwood
said. “And I love to make up
stuff.” She created an armoured
ensemble fit for a queen by
dressing up chain mail with
rolled leather and horsehair
trim and topping it off with
a particularly pointy metal
crown.
“We wanted to have a formidable silhouette,” Atwood
said, “and from a distance it’s
spooky with the crown and
her height and everything.”
(Theron stands nearly six feet
tall, the designer added.)
In Sanders’ version of the
Snow White story, Kristen
Stewart portrays the only
woman in the land fairer than
Theron’s evil queen Ravenna.
The queen dispatches a huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) to kill
the young woman, but instead
he becomes her mentor and
protector.
Atwood took on the project

Academy-Award-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood with a costume
from Snow White and the Huntsman in Los Angeles. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

after finishing work on Tim
Burton’s Dark Shadows, starring Johnny Depp. Atwood and
Burton are frequent and successful collaborators. Her most
recent Oscar was for his 2010
film Alice in Wonderland, and
she earned nominations for her
costumes in Burton’s Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber of

Fleet Street and Sleepy Hollow.
Snow White director Sanders said Atwood’s wardrobes
“blend seamlessly into this
world, and they speak volumes
about the world and its characters.”
Theron agreed. From the
wedding dress, with its architectural shoulders that appear

to be made from bones, to the
twice-embroidered gown that
eventually resembles an old,
peeling skin, Atwood’s costumes reflect the evil queen’s
obsession with appearances.
“Every costume had a feeling of not quite what it seems,”
Theron said. “In a way, these
dresses were like torture devices for Ravenna. I love that because I feel like Ravenna was, in
a way, more torturous toward
herself than to the people she
was killing.”
To minimize the actual onset torture, Atwood employed
a team of about 50 people to
help the actors in and out of the
elaborate costumes.
But the beetle wings remain
dangerous. Thousands of the
hard, brittle wings decorate the
evil queen’s regal dress of silk
and metal mesh.
“They’re incredibly sharp, so
I had to be careful about how I
used them. If you hit them, you
can hurt yourself,” the designer
said. “They’re quite treacherous, which really suited the
character.” THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A guide to killer animal movies
Piranha 3DD. In the
hinterland who’s who
of cinema there are as
many kinds of ‘animals
gone wild’ movies as
there are animals
IN
FOCUS

Richard Crouse
scene@metronews.ca

This weekend Piranha 3DD
dusts off not one, but two nature attacks genres.
First and foremost it falls
squarely into the ‘death from
the briny depths’ category. In

the movie blood-crazed prehistoric fish nibble their way
through a fresh pack of nubile
teenagers at a water park, joining the likes of Jaws (hungry
shark on the beach species),
Mako: Jaws of Death (psychic
sharks) and Tentacles (angry
squid gets even with calamari
eaters) and Piranha, the 1978
film about man eating fish at
a summer resort (“They’re eating the guests, sir.”). Frankenfish features a genetically engineered fish who is a double
threat — it swims and walks on
land!
Piranha 3DD also falls into
the ‘hungry primeval creature’
sub-genre. Most famous of this
genre is Grizzly, a 1976 movie
about an ancient 18-foot bear
who snacks on campers.

On the other end of the
scale are the ‘mutated bug’
movies. Tired of being squished
under foot these critters are the
product of scientific research
or radioactive mutation. Them!
and Empire of the Ants see
radioactively modified ants acting up, while William Shatner
battles killer web-slingers in
Kingdom of the Spiders. In Spider one character sums up the
plot with the line, “That spider
is a killing machine!”
Alfred Hitchcock didn’t invent the ‘when-animals-attack’
genre, but he helped create the
‘we’re mad as hell and aren’t
going to take it anymore’ (animal edition) variety.
Animals had gone wild on
film before The Birds, but usually because they were tormented

Citytv
announces
fall lineup

A new comedy from
the creators of Will &
Grace, the addition of
late night host Jimmy
Kimmel and the arrival
of Katie Couric’s daytime
talk show are among the
highlights of Citytv’s fall
slate of shows. Upcoming offerings include the
buddy comedy Partners
from Will & Grace creators David Kohan and
Max Mutchnick, the oddcouple sibling sitcom
Ben and Kate, Mindy
Kaling’s single-camera
The Mindy Project and
Reba McEntire’s Malibu
Country. Another five
comedies are set for
mid-season: 1600 Penn,
about life in a dysfunctional White House; The
Goodwin Games about
three grown siblings
who stand to inherit millions; How to Live with
Your Parents (For the
Rest of Your Life) with
Sarah Chalke as a single
mom forced to move
back in with her parents;
plus Citytv productions
Package Deal, about
three overly close brothers and Seed, about a
sperm donor who becomes entangled in the
lives of his newfound
children. Meanwhile,
J.J. Abrams’s dystopian
drama Revolution and
the creepy 666 Park
Avenue also hit airwaves
this fall. The Hannibal
Lecter thriller Hannibal
and Sex and the City prequel The Carrie Diaries
will air mid-season.
THE CANADIAN PRESS

Christopher Lloyd stars as Mr. Goodman in Piranha 3DD

by their owners — King Kong
— or victims of radiation — see
‘chemically altered bug movies’ — or hungry — Food of the
Gods where giant chickens feed
on humans — but Hitchcock’s
birds attack for no reason.
Next is the ‘mother nature
is angry’ genus, and everyone
knows it’s best not to annoy
Mother Earth. Everyone that is
except the campers who learn

HANDOUT

that forest animals don’t react
kindly to having their home
turned into a waste dump in
Long Weekend.
And finally there’s the ‘animal cage match’, seen in Frogs,
in which members of a rich
Southern family are massacred
by all manner of animals —
birds, lizards and even butterflies — in payback for ruining
the environment.

WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO LIMIT QUANTITIES
ON ALL ITEMS WHILE THEY LAST.

scene

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

31

Buy 3, get the 4th

All Books & Magazines.
In-store until Sunday.
Brandon Routh plays a high school lacrosse coach who returns to his roots in Crooked Arrows.

contributed

From ‘faster than a
speeding bullet’ to
a Crooked Arrow
A bit of a gamble. A
wealthy businessman
wants to put a casino
in the aboriginal
community where he
grew up. The catch? He’s
got to coach lacrosse
LIZ
Brown

scene@metronews.ca

It’s been six years since Brandon Routh donned a cape and
leotards for his role as Superman in Superman Returns.
But is the 31-year-old actor
softening on his man of steel
reputation? It would seem so in
his new film, Crooked Arrows.
In the movie, Routh’s athletic
prowess is challenged — by
way of a race — by a hopeless
high school lacrosse team that
he’s been charged with coaching. It ends in a sprint and embarrassment for the man who
could once claim he was faster
than a speeding bullet.
“I had to pull up a bit, that
was an acting job,” he insists,
laughing. “I’m a bit older than
those guys, but I’m still pretty
fast.”
Regardless, Routh’s character is more prodigal than
super in Crooked Arrows. He
plays half-Iroquois Joe Logan,
a successful businessman and
former high school lacrosse
star who has lost touch with his
Native American roots. When

he returns to his community to
convince his father, the chief,
to build a casino on the land,
his father and the rest of the
council concede to the idea —
on one condition — he coaches
the high school lacrosse team
that hasn’t won a single game
all season. Oh yeah, he also has
to find his roots again.
Sound a bit like the Mighty
Ducks? It is. The main difference is, of course, the sport and
the role that Native American
culture and spirituality play in
the film.
For Routh, the role was an
opportunity to engross himself
in some of his own background
— his father’s family has Kickapoo heritage. “Obviously the
Iroquois nation is separate
from (Kickapoo) but I was excited because I didn’t have any
contact with that culture in my
family because we were so far
removed,” he says.
He also got to learn a little
bit more about lacrosse, admitting his only exposure to the
game before the film was a
one-week stint in Grade 8 phys
-ed and the occasional game on
ESPN. “When you see me take
some shots, I had to learn for
that specific scene just so that I
looked legit, which took a lot of
time,” he says.
The most important lesson
he took from lacrosse, though,
was the culture surrounding
the sport. “Watching (Native
Americans) play and hearing
them talk about why they play
gave me a lot of insight into
how they live life. Just knowing

Avoiding stereotypes

Showing
Native
American
culture
With a story that focuses
so much on culture and
spirituality, it is always a
challenge not to make assumptions or oversimplify a
complex society.
Routh says the producers and writers avoided
this by going through
several script edits.
“Ten years ago, when
this idea started out, that
was a challenge. Two guys
had an idea about making
this film and they had passion for it, but they didn’t
know Native American culture very well. So the script
went through pass after
pass after pass,” he says.
“There was somebody
at the Smithsonian who
looked at it and helped
refine it, but there was also
a lot of input from people
from the Onondaga area.”
that one reason they play this
game is not to win, per se, but
to entertain the creator. That’s
an interesting prospect and a
lot more can be learned from
participating in a sport if you
play that way.”

/chaptersindigo
Valid in-store only on in-stock books and magazines until June 3, 2012. Not valid online or on kiosk
orders. Does not apply towards the purchase of eBooks, newspapers or Indigo Love of Reading
fundraising book related products. Free book or magazine must be of equal or lesser value than
the lowest priced qualifying item purchased. Offer may change or end at any time without notice.
™Indigo Books & Music Inc.

32

SCENE

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Trebek triumphs
with another trophy
Peabody Award. Host
of Jeopardy is in New
York to receive an
electronic media award
for hit game show

Piotr Stanczyk in Hamlet

Christopher Wahl/submitted

Sceneopolis

To ballet or
not to ballet:
What’s on
stage this
week
jonathan
naymark

scene@metronews.ca

While June is a period of
transition for many of Toronto’s theatres as their
season draws to a close and
Luminato tides us over until
the launch of the Stratford
and Shaw Festivals, there are
still some exciting shows onstage now!
At Toronto’s venerable
Tarragon Theatre is a revival of one of Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay’s
best known works: The Real
World. With no affiliation
to the banal MTV show of
the same name, Tremblay’s
The Real World explores the
relationship between his
own biography and his ability to create art out of his
past. The Tarragon Theatre
hosted the English language
premiere of the Real World
almost 25 years ago and

Tremblay’s words continue
to be relevant as well as
thought provoking.
The Real World opened
at the Tarragon Theatre last
week and is on stage until
June 3.
Downtown,
Toronto’s
National Ballet Company is
proud to present the North
American premiere of the
Ballet Manheim version of
Hamlet. Choreographed by
Kevin O’Day in 2008 this ballet version of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet has yet to be seen
in North America. Known
for its faithful adherence to
Shakespeare’s story, O’Day’s
Hamlet is skillful in its ability to merge plot with dance.
Hamlet is on stage at the
Four Seasons Centre for the
Performing Arts from June
1-9.
Stay tuned next week for
our complete Luminato Preview!

Let’s take “Breakfast” for $500:
An Oh Henry! chocolate bar
and a Diet Pepsi.
And here’s the question:
What did Alex Trebek consume a couple of hours before
this breakfast interview?
“When I say ‘the Breakfast
of Champions,’ I’m serious,”
he jokes as he orders just coffee.
A morning routine of candy
and cola might not seem
strange for someone other
than Trebek. But for
28 years as host of
Jeopardy! he’s
blended
likeability
with an
air of erudition
and correctness.
H e ’ s
seem-

Every Wednesday, Sceneopolis.
com — a new arts and culture
subscription website — will
bring you the latest from
stages across the city. Sceneopolis subscriptions cost
only $45; Metro readers
receive a $5 discount with
the code: metro5. To take
advantage of exclusive theatre tickets and discounts
check out sceneopolis.com.

ingly not the sort of guy who,
at 71, might choose a wakeup menu better suited to a
child whose mother’s back is
turned.
Trebek acknowledges the
apparent contradiction, and,
in his resonant, precise voice,
is happy to cite another.
“People say, ‘You look to be
in great shape for your age,’
and I guess I am,” he allows –
“except that I keep breaking
things.”
There’s that darned Achilles tendon, which he tore last
July chasing a woman who
invaded his San Francisco hotel room and filched several
items.
“It’s been nine months,
and it still kills me when I
walk,” Trebek says. “And I’m
constantly injuring myself.
Doing work around the house,
you don’t notice when
you injure yourself.
An hour later you
say, ‘Geez, I’m
bleeding. How
did that happen?’
“ E x c e p t ,”
he adds with
a bit of comic
timing, “if you
bang your head,
you no-

tice. You should never wear a
baseball cap when working in
close quarters in the attic: You
never see that beam above
you!”
But if Trebek repairing his
roof on a tottery ladder (result: a broken arm) seems out
of character, so be it. In person, he is leading-man handsome in a natty grey suit, a
model of calm and control,
the perfect steward of TV’s
answer-and-question institution. (Check local listings for
time and channel.)
The L.A.-based Trebek is
in New York to receive a Peabody Award for electronic
media, as Jeopardy joins
other awardees that include
serious documentaries, edgy
comedies and high-toned
dramas.
“We’re in some prestigious company,” Trebek says.
“But I think what makes

JACK WHITE

will be performing
at Lollapalooza

Jeopardy! special is that,
among all the quiz and game
shows out there, ours tends
to encourage learning.
A lot of the stuff is trivia,
but maybe a subject will
come up that will arouse the
viewers’ curiosity and they’ll
want to find out more. We
tell you it’s OK to be bright,
to know a lot of things, and
to want to learn.”
Certainly, the Jeopardy
audience (which averages
nine million daily) is rallied
by each day’s three contestants who confront the
game board with its halfdozen categories, each of
whose five answers demands
the right question.
Maybe never in the
show’s long history was
the competition fiercer, and
more fun, than in February
2011, when a supercomputer named Watson humbled
reigning human champs in
a battle of Machine vs. Man.
“I for one welcome
our new computer overlords,” Ken Jennings (famed
record-holder for the longest winning streak) scribbled
alongside his Final Jeopardy
response.
Just
another
learning experience for all.
the associated press

Flaming Lips frontman
Wayne Coyne can always
be counted on to fulfill
a few basic rock ‘n’ roll
needs: providing drastic
psychedelic
reinterpretations of songs you thought
you already knew; teaming up with left-field collaborators that might not
make sense on paper but
sound awesome in practice;
and tweeting the odd nude
photo of himself, somebody
he knows or somebody that
you know.
Yesterday, Coyne got a
hat trick when he tweeted
nude photos of Erykah Badu,
with whom he was shooting a video for a 10-minute
cover she did with the Lips
of a song that Roberta Flack
made famous, The First
Time Ever I Saw Your Face.
The photos showed Badu
bathing in glitter, covered
in blood and generally
seeming like a perfect foil

33

to Coyne’s weirdness.
God bless the Flaming
Lips!

@Mruff221
•••••
Did you know one hour of sunlight on the planet
delivers enough energy to power the entire world
for a year?

She’s expressing something

While rehearsing her hit
Express Yourself for a concert in Tel Aviv over the
weekend, Madonna mixed
things up a little and transitioned eerily, hilariously
smoothly into Lady Gaga’s
Born This Way.
Like everyone else, Madonna flagged Gaga’s song
for sounding like a knockoff when it was released,
calling it “reductive” and a
“wonderful redo” of Express
Yourself.
We’re not sure what to
think here: playful peace
offering
acknowledging that there’s room for
two, or is this Madonna’s
severed
unicorn
head?
with files from Monica weymouth

@pattonoswalt
•••••
For discovering all those murder victims over the
years -- thank you, hikers.

Bar Refaeli

Bar Refaeli dishes on her
celebrity crushes
A few years with Leonardo DiCaprio has apparently made
Bar Refaeli choosy when it
comes to men.
“Justin Bieber and I are
going to get married some
day,” she tells Us Weekly at
the Maxim magazine Hot 100
party. (Refaeli came in at No.
1, by the way.) “I also like Tom
Cruise. He’s very classy. I liked

him in Jerry Maguire and in
roles like that.”
And
while
Refaeli’s
tastes skew A-list, they’re
not confined to men, as the
Israeli model admits she
has a massive girl-crush
on Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence. “She’s natural, she’s down to earth.
I think she’s all that.”

*

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34

TRAVEL

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

The top five arty hotels
A crappy reproduction of Van Goghâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sunflowers just doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t cut it in a boutique hotel trying to attract high-end,
culturally demanding guests. Here are some hotels that combine style with the feel of an art gallery.
METRO WORLD NEWS

LIFE

Travel in brief

When you
canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t take
Fido...
When you travel and
have to leave your dog
behind, you can call
a kennel, hire a pet
sitter â&#x20AC;&#x201D; or find him
a new friend online.
The website DogVacay
debuted in New York and
Los Angeles in March
and, just in time for the
summer travel season, is
now available throughout the United States and
Canada. The site lets pet
owners look up hosts in
the area who will care for
a dog in their own homes,
giving a pet the food,
exercise and attention you
would give if you stayed
home â&#x20AC;&#x201D; sort of a doggy
version of couch-surfing.
Visit dogvacay.com for
more information.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

In 2005, the photography-loving owners
of Hotels Paris Rive
Gauche, a group of
boutique hotel gems
in the French capital,
commissioned photographers to capture the
essence of a nightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stay
at one of their hotels
in a single shot. The
project proved such a
hit that it inspired an
annual â&#x20AC;&#x153;A hotel photo,
an artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s viewâ&#x20AC;? photo
prize and exhibition, to
support up-and-coming
photographers. Each
month a different young
photographer is invited
to give their take on a
nightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stay at a HPRG
hotel; the results are
shown on phpa.fr and in
an annual show in a gallery. hotel-belle-julietteparis.com

Town Hall Hotel,
London, England

The owners of this imposing hotel in the former
Bethnal Green Town Hall
commissioned seven
artists to create works as
it was being built. They
integrate sensitively with
the original features from
the 1910s and 1930s and
reflect the buildingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rich
history; the art here is
built into the hotel. So
Debbie Lawsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wooden
veneer Victorian-era ladies
of the night are discreetly
inlaid into the parquet
floor that runs along the
first floor corridor, and
Zoe Mendelsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s artwork lights up the 1930s
original Town Hall safe in
the reception.
townhallhotel.com

The Gladstone
Hotel, Toronto

Not only are the 37 rooms
in Torontoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s artiest and
oldest continuouslyoperating hotel designed
by artists, but the entire
building is dedicated to
art. A full-time curator
organizes exhibitions in
the four galleries, and the
hotel hosts around 100
art events and exhibitions
every year, as well as live
performances, comedy,
gigs, burlesque and creative courses. More than
4,000 art lovers flock to
the annual Come Up To
My Room festival, when
artists and designers
display their works, with
sculptures throughout the
corridors, the guestrooms
and generally imposing
their presence on the hotelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s public spaces for four
days. gladstonehotel.com

Gramercy Park
Hotel, New York

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not every night that
you get to sleep beneath
one of Damien Hirstâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s
spin paintings, but you
can do that at the Gramercy Park Hotel. This is
hotel meets art museum.
The flamboyant interiors
of this grand hotel were
reconceived by designer
Ian Schrager and painter
Julian Schnabel, whose
work hangs above the
fireplace. Priceless works
are littered throughout
this wildly creative space,
from Basquiats and Andy
Warhols discreetly hung
in lounges alongside bespoke designer furniture
pieces, to a vast scarlet Cy
Twombly canvas in the
lounge.
gramercyparkhotel.com

The Saxon Hotel,
Johannesburg,
South Africa

This luxurious hotel in
Johannesburg has a strong
sense of its African heritage â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Nelson Mandela
moved in here after he
was released from his
prison ordeal and wrote
his famous autobiography,
The Long Road to Freedom. The hotel recently
invested in a significant
collection of African art,
acquiring more than 200
original artworks created by 11 emerging and
established South African
artists, giving guests the
chance to fully immerse
themselves in African
culture. saxon.co.za

Iceberg tours offer
a prehistoric taste
of the last ice age
Newfoundland.
Nature’s frozen
sculptures from
another era make for
great sightseeing on
the east coast
Six weeks after the 100th
anniversary of the Titanic
disaster showcased Iceberg
Alley off Newfoundland, an
early and plentiful show of
the glacial sculptures is drawing visitors from around the
world.
Tourists from Japan, South
Africa, Europe, the U.S. and
across Canada are lining up
for their chance to admire
these mammoth relics from
the last ice age.
Huge white-and-aqua-blue
blocks carved by wind and
waves into towering pillars,
contoured slabs and smooth
Henry Moore-like shapes now
dot the province’s coastlines.
Capt. Barry Rogers, coowner and operator of Iceberg Quest Ocean Tours with
his wife Carol Anne Hayes,
says it has already been the
best iceberg viewing season
off St. John’s in recent years.
“Normally our season is
the latter part of May and
June.
“We’ve been doing iceberg
tours since May 9, and with
full boats,” he said of the vessel that’s equipped with a life
raft for 75 people along with
personal flotation devices.
It typically carries between
about 30 and 50 passengers,
he said.
On a recent tour, Rogers steered the boat through
St. John’s Harbour, past the
colourful clapboard houses
of the Battery that hug Signal Hill, through the Narrows

and out into the open North
Atlantic. Cruising at about
eight knots past Cape Spear’s
iconic flashing lighthouse,
the most easterly point of
North America, it wasn’t long
before relatively small but
hazardous chunks of ice, or
“bergy bits,” could be seen in
the water.
These rock-hard blocks of
ice are feared by mariners
for their ability to slice even
the strongest hull like a can
opener. Rogers said bergy bits
are a major reason why he
avoids night trips at this time
of year.
Melting pieces of ice less
than five metres long are
called “growlers” for the
sounds they make, “like a
saucy dog” as they release air,
he added.
A bit farther out, the
boat’s radar picked up something that was soon seen rising up from the water ahead.
It was a tabular iceberg, about
90-metres long and 45-metres
wide, flat on the surface
where icy dust was visible
alongside deepening crevices and cracks. Melt-water
rushed off in places like small
rivers.
“Awesome!” was the response from several passengers as Rogers asked what
they thought.
“We’re looking at 600 to
700 feet of water underneath
us right now,” the captain
said, urging them to envision
that 90 per cent of the berg’s
mass is submerged.
Rogers described over
a microphone how the big
slab likely split from glaciers
that cover much of Greenland. They form a thick ice
coating that creeps down
hills and ridges, breaking
off with a booming crash as
it reaches the sea. Resulting
bergs are believed to be at

least 12,000-year-old frozen
samples of some of the purest
water on earth. They float because they’re less dense than
sea water.
Tourists are especially fascinated with icebergs because
of the Titanic and a surging
interest in Newfoundland
and Labrador thanks to a hit
advertising campaign, Rogers
said. The International Ice Patrol, formed after a relatively
small berg sank the great
ship on April 15, 1912, to this
day reports the movement of
sea ice for those navigating
these dangerous waters.
One crew member armed
with a large fishing net captured a chunk of ice to chip
into prehistoric cocktails.
“We sprinkle rum over the
12,000-year-old ice,” Rogers
said. “Where else would you
get to consume something
that’s from the ice ages?”
Shane Sweeney, a crane
operator from Peterborough,
N.H., has seen glaciers in Alaska but was impressed with
what he saw off Newfoundland. “Most places you go in the
world you’re not going to see
ice floating around like that.”
The Canadian Press

Steve Lake, a crew member aboard Iceberg Quest Ocean Tours, holds up an iceberg chunk estimated to be at
least 12,000 years old that was set to be chipped into cocktails. mike wert/the canadian press

Nathan Stanley and Steve Lake look at an iceberg in the North Atlantic aboard Iceberg Quest Ocean Tours.
mike wert/the canadian press

Upgraded Experience!
The one-day Canadian wilderness rail excursion is better than ever,
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36

TRAVEL

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

A colour lithograph of George Ehret’s Hell Gate Brewery, which will be a part
of the Beer Here exhibit. photos: the associated press

A Currier & Ives colour lithograph dating from between 1877-1894, which is part of the Beer Here exhibit.

Society and suds: New York City
exhibit traces history of beer
Raise your glass. Get a
Colonial history lesson
and finish off the
afternoon with a frosty
pint at the bar that’s
part of the exhibit
Beer was hip in New York long
before hipsters were into craft
brews, according to a new exhibit at the New York Historical Society that traces the history of beer all the way back to
drunken colonial times.
And it’s not your typical
staid museum display: There’s

even a bar at the end of it.
Beer Here, which opens
Friday in New York City and
runs through Sept. 2, aims to
show that beer is steeped in the
state’s alcoholic history. From a
manifest with beer orders for
George Washington’s troops to
the diary of a 14-year-old hop
picker, the exhibit capitalizes
on the growing popularity of
microbreweries and beer gardens. And it makes the case
that, once upon a time, New
York — once called New Amsterdam — was at the forefront
of the American beer scene.
“Beer was very important to
New Yorkers from the earliest
point of colonization,” said mu-

seum curator Debra Schmidt
Bach. “The Dutch have a strong
beer tradition, so it was a very
common drink in their culture,
and that’s true for the English,
as well.”
New York City was notorious for its taverns in the mid1700s, when there were more
watering holes here than in
any other colony after Dutch
colonists brought beer over by
the boatload from Europe. Back
then, beer was often healthier
to drink than water.
“Clean water was a huge
issue,” Schmidt Bach said. “And
most of the sources that had
been developed in the early
18th century were pretty pol-

luted by the 1770s. So absolutely, beer was much cleaner.”
Scratched, cloudy-looking
ale and porter bottles excavated from lower Manhattan are
on display as evidence of beer’s
popularity there during the
18th and 19th centuries. And
an accounting ledger from tavern owner William D. Faulkner
— no relation to the famous
writer — shows he supplied
beer to thirsty Revolutionary
War soldiers, continental and
British soldiers alike.
Old-fashioned tools used
to harvest ice in up-state New
York are on display, detailing
the process that enabled brewers to keep beer cool during the

Resurgence

Will NYC
return to its
sudsy glory?
While New York was a beer
hub in the 18th and 19th
centuries, blue mildew
outbreaks and spider mite
infestations decimated the
hops a century later — and
warmer months. Hops became
a commercial crop in 1808,
thanks to the state’s hop-friend-

the advent of Prohibition
was the death knell for
New York’s dominance
as a viable hops-growing
area. The region has lagged
behind the rest of the
country’s beer entrepreneurs ever since. But the
explosion of microbreweries
in recent years has some
people hoping beer is making
a comeback.
ly climate, and Bavarian lagers
arrived soon afterward.
The Associated Press

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GAAADVP22850_FPF_Metro_12_02_13.indd

GAAADVP22850_FPF_Metro_12_02_13.indd
1
Docket #:
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Trim Size:

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Signoffs
Creative Team

12-02-09 5:03 PM

TRAVEL

metronews.ca
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

37

Weak snowpack
could leave paddlers
high and dry out west

Canoe? Check. Paddle? Check.
Life preserver? Check. Epic
whitewater conditions? Maybe
next year.
After a winter of historically
low snowpack combined with
an earlier-than-normal runoff,
Colorado river guides and tourists are adjusting their spring
and summer plans for what is
turning out to be an early paddling season.
â&#x20AC;&#x153;We really live on snowpack. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what it comes
down to,â&#x20AC;? said Richard Ferguson, a trip co-ordinator for
The Poudre Paddlers Canoe
and Kayak Club, which serves
northern Colorado.
The whitewater canoeist
said low river flows already
have forced him to cancel one
trip scheduled in July on the
Yampa River in northwest
Colorado. Another group outing that had been planned for
Memorial Day had to be moved.
â&#x20AC;&#x153;A light snowpack means
that the peak is very early,â&#x20AC;? Ferguson said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;What happens is
the season just disappears very
quickly. What you have essentially is no water to paddle in.â&#x20AC;?
Although he still plans to
hit the rapids just about every
other week for the time being,
Ferguson predicts there wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t
be any paddling on northern
Coloradoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Poudre River by
mid-summer.
â&#x20AC;&#x153;At some point youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re scraping bottom and kind of beating
up your boat,â&#x20AC;? he said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;At some
point it gets to where itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really
not worth it anymore.â&#x20AC;?

That point is not yet clear.
According to The Natural
Resources Conservation Service, the statewide snowpack
was seven per cent of average
as of last Thursday, with more
than half of all snow survey locations in Colorado reporting
no snow.
Mage Skordahl, the NRCSâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s
assistant snow survey supervisor, said Coloradoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s snowpack
peaked around March 12, a
month ahead of average, and
current conditions in the state
match those recorded during
the record-setting drought of
2002, one of the toughest years
for river guides in the state.
Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a scenario that is playing
out across a vast swath of the
west this year, especially in the
Colorado River Basin, which
drains parts of seven states
and is largely parched by severe drought this year, according to the National Integrated
Drought Information System.
Alex Mickel, president of
Mild to Wild Rafting and Jeep
Trail Tours in Arizona, said his
company tries to take advantage of the early runoff to run
trips on the Verde and Salt rivers, but the amount of snowfall
dictates how long the rafting
season will run.
With more snowfall in
eastern Arizonaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s White Mountains this past winter, the trips
lasted longer than the previous year but still had to be cut
short by about a week because
of the low water levels.
â&#x20AC;&#x153;Anytime we make it into
May, we consider it a success,â&#x20AC;?
Mickel said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re glad we got
enough snow to do that. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d
certainly like to see more.â&#x20AC;?
In New Mexico, drought
continues its grip across the
state to some degree, and
water levels in reservoirs
are low. Meanwhile, the Rio
Grande, Chama and other rivers known for rafting arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t as

Hope springs...

Low water
isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t always
a bad thing
Jon Donaldson, co-owner
of River Runners, a rafting
guide company based in
Buena Vista, said â&#x20AC;&#x153;weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re
going ahead full bore like
there wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be an effect.
â&#x20AC;&#x153;The flows are part of
the equation but not the
main part of the equation,â&#x20AC;? he said, adding that,
although counterintuitive,
this season could be better for business because
of the weak snowpack
and low river flows.
High water last season
â&#x20AC;&#x201D; especially in the Royal
Gorge area near Canon
City â&#x20AC;&#x201D; closed parts of the
popular Arkansas River
because they were too
dangerous to navigate.
high as in years past. But with
persisting dry conditions, rafting companies say they have
learned to adapt to lower river
levels over the last couple of
years.
And despite New Mexicoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s
recent statewide drought declaration, some areas like Taos
had decent snowfall over the
winter.
In fact, northern New Mexico had the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s best early
snow conditions, and because
of that, some outdoor enthusiasts could steer toward the
state rather than places like
Colorado and Wyoming.
Still, some in Colorado
think this season will turn out
OK and are hoping potential
rafters will not be deterred.
The Associated Press